May 12, 2016
In mid-May I had the luxury of attending the UX Game Summit, hosted by Epic Games at the Durham Convention Center in Durham, NC. The day was filled with a load of wonderful speakers.
The first speaker was Dr. Anne McLaughlin who also teaches at NC State in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition PhD program. She teaches Human Factors at the graduate level along with several other classes.
She spoke about signal detection in Virtual Reality. It was really quite fascinating. She included a funny video of someone running into a wall while wearing a VR device. It reminded me of Virtuix, which is pretty cool. I doubt that I’d maintain my kill/death ratio when playing Battlefield or COD but, it definitely would be fun. I attended the ITSEC conference in 2014 and it was full of simulation equipment, including applications in flight, construction, medical, military, and gaming. Most of the simulation booths weren’t as advanced as Virtuix. UX practitioners and researchers are still dealing with how to deal with a potentially infinite area within finite environments.
I think the only real way to deal with this problem is to trick the brain into thinking it’s in the environment which will be far more difficult. This would require us to mimic perceptual processes so that they can be recreated in a virtual world. Essentially, we’re heading towards a more Matrix-like future, which to be quite honest sounds pretty awesome. I’d love to know kung-fu.
We’re actually already heading in that direction. By firing up the same sectors of the brain (the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) that were seen to be lighting up in experts, researchers were able to lift performance in novice performers by 33%.
Super interesting stuff.
The next speaker, Ian from King (makers of Candy Crush) was pretty entertaining. Very cool, and casual; you could see how happy and enthused about his work he was. He definitely delivered. I could easily see a gamer and a marketing professional. He had a lot of interesting things to talk about but there were ten principles that he shared that I thought was really important. I think the term “player” can be replaced with user for other industries. I think the principles he outlined are pretty stellar.
- Be crystal clear in player value
- Be truthful but not overwhelming
- “Showing” is better than “Telling” is better than “Asking”
- Match a player’s experience level
- Match players’ expectations
- Speak human
- Nothing boring
- Never cool for cool’s sake (e.g., don’t be cool just for the sake of being cool)
- Flows, not screens
- Be aware of context
- The final word comes at launch
All in all, pretty great.
The next speaker, Ian Hamilton, owner of Game Accessibility Guidelines had one of the most important discussions of the day: accessibility. There were a lot of stories of users with blindness, deafness, color blindness, and other medical conditions. I think the most important point he made was this:
There is a difference between a disability and a medical condition.
Usually, neither of these are the fault of the user. For example, stairs create a disability for people in wheelchairs. This makes an important point for user experience practitioners – disabilities are usually created. With proper planning and research, many accessibility issues can be solved before they even exist. Including accessibility features will actually increase playability for individual without impairing medical conditions. Creating larger subtitles and subtitle options help everyone, not just users that have trouble hearing.
The next speaker, Steve Mack, focused on how to increase playability by auditing the existing schema for champions, the main characters of League of Legends by Riot Games.
It was a pretty in depth discussion of really getting to know users, down the character level: who uses these characters, how do they use these champions? what are the differences between players using type A champions versus players using type B champions. Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less than the extensive understanding of the profusion of information found in player dynamics from a Bayesian practitioner. Hats off to Steve for providing everyone with a textbook example of how to maximize user data.